Parkanaur House & Forest

Parkanaur House is a Class A listed large Tudor Revival style house in the village of Castlecaulfield near Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

The present house is a two-storey building constructed in the 1840s from block rubble. It has a terraced front with octagonal pinnacles and gables at each projection of the façade, a big bay window and an upper oriel and incorporates an earlier two storey building as an east wing. At the rear is a coach house and free-standing office block. Land previously owned by the O'Donnelly family was granted by James I to Sir Toby Caulfield in the early 1600s and remained in the possession of the family until sold to Ynyr Burges in 1771. His descendants built a two-storey cottage on the estate which they called Edenfield. In the 1820s John Henry Burges moved in and enlarged the cottage, and his son John Ynyr Burges commissioned architect Thomas Duff to design a new mansion, which was built between 1839 and 1854, which he renamed Parkanaur

The house remained in the Burges family until they moved to England in 1955. It was then bought by American millionaire Thomas Doran who had emigrated from Castle Caulfield as a teenager. He made the property available to his friend Rev Gerry Eakins to develop a new centre for the education of handicapped young adults. The house reopened in 1960 as 'The Thomas Doran Training Centre', (Parkanaur College) and much of the house continues today in this role.

The grounds were opened to the public as Parkanaur Forest Park in 1983. Colourful in spring with daffodils and rhododendrons and home to a herd of white fallow deer, the forest’s nature trail runs through oak and beech trees, passing a Victorian garden, wishing well and old archway making it an ideal location for countryside walks and picnics.